Balancing school and work with new opportunities: changes in children’s gendered time use in Ethiopia (2006–2013)

ABSTRACT

We explore the temporal dimension of childhood, through time use of boys and girls in Ethiopia, focusing on the relationship between children’s work and school attendance. We argue that children’s time use reflects both current exigencies and more strategic future-orientated considerations, with work mainly serving the former, and education, the latter. We compare two cohorts of children aged 12 years from Young Lives longitudinal study, interviewed at two different points in time, 2006 and 2013. We examine the role of education aspirations, labour demand and structural factors such as household wealth and composition. Contrary to expectations, increased returns to work in rural areas have lowered boys’ education aspirations and increased their school drop-out rates relative to girls’. Though time allocation is correlated with educational aspirations, we demonstrate that aspirations are not static, and change over childhood; locality and everyday exigencies interact with gender in reshaping children’s aspirations and time-use.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethiopia
• child work
• schooling
• gender
• time-use
• education aspirations

Acknowledgements

Young Lives was funded from 2001 to 2017 by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID). Data are publicly available, see www.younglives.org.uk. We are grateful to Karin Heissler, Alula Pankhurst, Yisak Tafere and anonymous reviewers for comments, to Deborah Walnicki for very effective research assistance, and to the Young Lives children and families for generously sharing their experiences and perspectives with us over many years. All errors and omissions are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Ethiopia, this assumption has given rise to a series of ‘pro-girl’ initiatives to increase their participation, for example, https://www.girleffect.org/where-we-work/africa/ethiopia/ and https://girlseducationchallenge.org/#/, focusing on school retention and related measures.

2 Relevant variables in the survey for our analysis include school enrolment, educational aspirations and attainment, and numbers of hours worked in different activities. Education aspirations are assessed by asking children: 'Imagine you had no constraints and could study for as long as you liked, or go back to school if you have already left. What level of formal education would you like to complete?' and caregivers: 'Ideally what level of formal education would you like {child’s name} to complete?' 'Ideally what level of formal education would you like {child’s name} to complete?'

3 Note that all village and child names are pseudonyms to protect anonymity of the respondents. See Morrow (2009) for discussion of this and other ethical issues raised in the Young Lives survey.

4 These findings may reflect the fact that in 2006 there were far fewer universities than in 2013.

5 To examine economic differences, we use a household wealth index, a composite of assets held by the household. We calculate the mean wealth index by survey round, separately for urban and rural sites. We classify as “poorer”, children from households with lower than average wealth, noting that already the sample is chosen from poorer sites in Ethiopia.

6 As noted, underreporting of paid work in the survey may affect these results.

7 This may be because irrigated farming was introduced prior to 2006 so the most significant impact on time use likely occurred before the Older Cohort had reached age 12.

8 However, Pankhurst et al (2016) report very high rates of early school departure in Leki, perhaps due to different timing ofdata-gathering or questions asked.

Additional information

Funding

Young Lives was funded from 2001 to 2017 by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID). Data are publicly available, see www.younglives.org.uk. We are grateful to Karin Heissler, Alula Pankhurst, Yisak Tafere and anonymous reviewers for comments, to Deborah Walnicki for very effective research assistance, and to the Young Lives children and families for generously sharing their experiences and perspectives with us over many years. All errors and omissions are our own.